Community Sentences (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Debate between Baroness Blake of Leeds and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven

Friday 26th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will bear with me as I speak during the gap. I am aware that such contributions are meant to be kept short, so I will speak relatively briefly. I do not need to mention my interest, because it has already been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.

I congratulate the committee on its report, which is absolutely excellent: it is rigorous and well-argued, and a very good piece of work. For my part, I agree with its conclusions and recommendations. I thought the Ministry of Justice’s response was careful and constructive, and also a very good piece of work. That said, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that the Government ought now to treat this as a springboard, rather than the final word, and to build on that response, because there is progress that can be made.

I will make a couple of points. I was delighted when, on Wednesday—I cannot remember whether it was during questions on the Lord Chancellor’s Statement or during the King’s Speech debate—the Minister went out of his way to remark upon the great attachment to public service of those working within the probation service. I was delighted, because my experience running the CPS taught me that there is nothing more destructive to the morale of a workforce than to be constantly criticised and abused—in the press and, sometimes, even by members of the Government, as I am afraid we have seen in the past. This drains enthusiasm and demotivates; it sucks the lifeblood out of a workforce.

I was interested to hear what the Minister had to say in his remarkable maiden speech about his own business and the way he treats his employees. I hope the Government will take a similar approach. Of course, when things go wrong, they have to be investigated and put right, but it seems that we hear only when things wrong; we do not hear about the countless occasions when the men and women working in our public services get things right.

There are other pressures; it is not simply media and political pressure. As others have made clear, the probation service is badly understaffed and underfunded. There are too many relatively junior probation officers taking on cases which should be reserved for more senior, experienced people, who do not exist in the service. This will take a long time to put right. Recruiting 1,000 new probation officers is better than nothing, but they will be trainee probation officers, at the bottom. Programmes to try to tempt back into service more senior figures who have left in recent years will also be important.

If it will become the aim of this Government, as I very much hope it will, to try to reduce our prison population, the obvious place for them to start will be at the lower end, with those serving shorter sentences who have the highest reoffending rates—over 50% for adults released from serving sentences of 12 months or under. However, if these individuals are released without some form of supervision, the policy will soon discredit itself, and the Government could even be forced into a U-turn. An absolute corollary of reducing the prison population is to boost probation and rehabilitation services. The former cannot happen successfully without the latter.

We are told that there is not enough money, and that may be the case, but we could save some money from the £600,000 it takes to build each new prison cell, put less people in prison, and spend some of that money perhaps on intensive treatment, probation officers and other rehabilitation services. We have the balance of expenditure wrong.

I was very interested in the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, during the King’s Speech debate on Wednesday. He is a distinguished former leader of the Liberal Democrats, and I think we can all agree—I am sure Liberal Democrats would—that he is a wise old bird. He made the point that it is important in this debate to keep lines of communication open with the top of the Government.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

Could I ask that the noble Lord makes his comments short, and brings them to a conclusion, please?

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

I will come to a conclusion now.

I was simply going to say that I think that is absolutely right. I knew the new Prime Minister for 25 years at the Bar, first as a practitioner and thereafter when he succeeded me as Director of Public Prosecutions. I think his instincts would tend towards supporting generally the conclusions of this report. If that is right, those inclinations, combined with the Minister’s well-known desire to boost rehabilitation, could lead, at last, to some real reform in this area.